Assembly and maintenance of large objects, such as repositionable structures, may be assisted by the use of positioning systems to guide placement of components. For example, aircraft may be assembled in facilities that include position determination systems and equipment to measure the position of certain components of the aircraft, such as wings and empennage, to ensure proper placement of the components. In airplane manufacturing, mechanics and quality assurance (QA) inspectors often need to find a specific location on an airplane. They may use paper printouts with text descriptions of the locations listed in terms of Cartesian X, Y, Z coordinates (sometimes referred to as station, buttline, and waterline in the aircraft industry). Sometimes drawings may also be used for guidance. Once the desired location is reached, the mechanic or QA inspector may need to perform tasks such as documenting coordinates of damage of items that need to be repaired. In some instances a tape measure may be used to determine distances from landmarks or features near the area of interest, which may be written down or typed into a laptop. These processes can be time consuming and are open to multiple sources of error, such as misinterpretation of the text or drawings, confusion regarding how the measurements are made, and manual transcription errors. Therefore, it is desirable to have a process for physical motion tracking that can be integrated with 3D models of the corresponding virtual environment.
Existing position determination systems suffer from various deficiencies. By way of example, optical motion capture is limited by size of the system and occlusions, magnetic tracking is affected by magnetic interference, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)-based methods require continuous visibility of high contrast features in the environment which are not always available, especially on the outside of the airplane. Standard inertial measurement unit (IMU) solutions for personal tracking suffer from accelerometer drift problems that cause direct computation of position to become unreliable over time.
Accordingly, systems and methods for 3D localization and navigation in a variable environment may find utility.